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said.
    “What are you trying to slip by Charlie now?” she asked warily.
    Georgia is the only person at the paper I trust to tell me when a column is lousy or a joke doesn’t work. Georgia was unflinchingly honest, even when I didn’t want her to be.
    She called me back ten minutes later. “I love it,” she said. “But you better have a backup. You know, Miz Condom on the Grapefruit, that Hadley is on one of his morality kicks.”
    “But I ran the idea past Charlie and he said to go for it,” I said.
    “I’ve also told you what Charlie means when he says that. Grab your ass and kiss it good-bye,” she said.
    Like many newswomen, Georgia could be coarse. Newsmen generally kept their maidenly modesty, and rarely uttered a vulgar word. Newswomen showed they were tough by talking tough. In Georgia’s case, she was genuinely tough. I knew she’d faced down a high-powered lawyer with a shady client who threatened her with a career-busting lawsuit. The
Gazette
had exposed his crooked client. Sometimes, evenwhen the
Gazette
was right, its wimpy lawyers would settle out of court because they thought some lawsuits were too expensive to defend. Georgia stood her ground, the lawyer with the exposed client blinked, and the
Gazette
’s honor and her career were saved.
    Georgia had saved my career, too. She was the one who’d opened my eyes to good-time Charlie. Ten years ago, when I had just started writing my column, I used to think that Charlie was my friend and mentor. He was always advising me on how to deal with Hadley. He told me I had to take a firm line with the managing editor. He urged me to go into Hadley’s office and confront him. So I did. I didn’t get anywhere, but I felt a lot better after I screamed at him. And it made me a hero to the staff. I was the brave woman who talked back to Hadley Harris the Third.
    Charlie’s advice advanced me all right. He almost advanced me right out of the newsroom. I probably never would have figured out what Charlie was up to if Georgia T. George hadn’t taken me under her wing. In those days I knew her only as a distant figure, one of the
Gazette
’s rare women editors. She was frighteningly smart. She existed on another plane, far above Charlie’s crowd. We said hello in the hall, but that was about it. Then I wrote my notorious Chicken Plucker column. It never made the paper, but the entire newsroom surreptitiously called it up on their computer screens and read it.
    I wrote about the Rialto, an exclusive St. Louis men’s club, which refused to admit women members because the men liked to swim nude in the club’s penthouse pool.
    I wrote, “The Rialto is supposed to be the club for the city’s movers and shakers. Most of them are shakers, or at least tremblers. The average age of a Rialto member is a frisky seventy-five. The Rialto refuses to admit women to the club because it says it will have to discontinue its nude swimming. The club spokesman who told me this was a scrawny old gentleman. Without his exquisitely tailored suit, he would look rather like a plucked chicken. So would most of the other club members. The thought of all those old pluckers naked in that pool is enough to make a woman take the veil.”
    Hadley was a member of the Rialto (and a scrawny old plucker to boot). When he saw that column on the “Family” page proof, he killed it instantly.
    Charlie said he would back me all the way on this one. He advised me to go in and yell at Hadley. “Shouting is the only way to make an impression on that guy,” Charlie said. “It takes guts, but he’ll respect you. Go in there and do it now. I’ll back you to the hilt.” After Charlie’s pep talk, I was ready. I was stalking across the newsroom to give Hadley what-for when I was intercepted by Georgia T. George.
    “Can I see you in my office?” she said sternly.
    Everyone standing nearby assumed she had been delegated to chew me out. That’s what Ithought, too. She looked so small and